Microsoft has officially released development tools for creating applications for quantum computers: version 1.0 of the Quantum Development Kit (QDK).
QDK is a development tool dedicated to building applications on Azure Quantum, a quantum computing service in the cloud. It is developed to run in a web browser without installation on PC, Mac and Linux via the Visual Studio Code (VS Code) extension. It provides an environment for developing applications using Q#, an open-source programming language developed for the quantum computing environment.
Version 1.0 of the QDK was rewritten from existing source code, and developed in WebAssembly and Python to speed up development. This makes it up to 100 times faster and more than 100 times smaller in file size than before, Microsoft said.
Decreased file size
The old QDK generated a 180MB+ binary file once a project was fully built and all dependencies installed. The new VSIX package is now only around 700 KB.
But the problem is that many software developers for quantum computers do not have experience with Microsoft’s development framework, .NET. Hence the possibility now of installing, learning, developing and deploying solutions in Python. The code base for application development has also been simplified and made more intuitive for developers to understand and use, Microsoft assures.
“With the release of QDK 1.0, we are now able to support the entire process of developing quantum computer applications in the browser,” said Bill Tyshurst, principal manager of quantum software engineering at Microsoft. He cautions, however: “Although we have named this version 1.0 of QDK, there are still some features to add to stabilize the service, such as support for multiple files, and we will continue to make improvements and present them on the GitHub repository”.
Source: “ZDNet Korea”